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Monthly Archives: March 2015

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Lizzie Velasquez will never forget the day she came upon a YouTube video with 4 million views and thousands of mean comments naming her the “World’s Ugliest Woman.” She was only 17 years old.

“When I saw it my whole world just felt like it crashed at that moment,” Velasquez, 26, tells PEOPLE of the experience that inspired her new documentary A Brave Heart, which premiered on Saturday at SXSW in Austin, Texas. “I thought, how in the world can I ever pick myself up from this?”

But Velasquez – who weighs just 63 lbs. due to a rare syndrome that doesn’t allow her to gain weight – did just that by becoming an anti-bullying activist and motivational speaker.

“If I ever see that person [who made the video] I would jump on them and give them the biggest hug in the world and tell them, ‘Thank you for…

Mary of Bethany, whose love for Jesus in Luke’s Gospel inspires her to ‘waste’ time sitting at his feet listening to him, is inspired by that same extravagant love in today’s haunting Gospel as she lavishly ‘wastes’ genuine aromatic nard to anoint Jesus’ feet.

Interesting to note that Jesus links her gesture of extravagant, excessive love with his upcoming Passion. Theologian Hans Urs von Baltahsar caught this point: ‘Wastefulness is the original Christian attitude …the entire Passion occurs under the sign of this complete self-wasting of God’s love for the world’